 Blake was educated at Rugby School and graduated in 1977 from Trinity College, Cambridge with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics and Electrical Sciences.After a year as a Kennedy Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and two years in the defence electronics industry, he studied for a PhD at the University of Edinburgh which was awarded in 1983 and supervised by Donald Michie.Until 1987 he was on the faculty of the department of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, as a Royal Society University Research Fellow.